


Inflammations

by rosewiththorns



Category: Hockey RPF
Genre: Detroit Red Wings, Gen, Olympics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-10
Updated: 2014-09-10
Packaged: 2018-02-16 20:07:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,247
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2282916
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rosewiththorns/pseuds/rosewiththorns
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the Sochi Olympics, Pavel Datsyuk and Mike Babcock have an argument about Pavel's knee.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Inflammations

Inflammations

Mike Babcock glowered down at the list of players on IR, which seemed to be ever-expanding and likely to reach Critical Mass and develop a lifestyle of its own any game now. Typically, he didn’t concern himself with the names on the list. While they were out, the doctors and trainers were responsible for them. He didn’t need to worry about them until they were back on the roster. Dwelling on injuries was a distraction and weakness he couldn’t afford when making the playoffs was enough of an uphill battle through knee-high mud for his team. 

Today, though, his narrowing eyes were riveting like a laser on one particular name: Pavel Datsyuk, who had skated basically on one leg during the final practice before the Olympics, but who had competed in Sochi anyway and gotten double-shifted by the son-of-a-bitch Russian coach. Now Pavel would be out with an inflamed knee for at least another two weeks—longer if he needed surgery. 

What a fucking surprise of a development that a Pee Wee could have predicted without much strain of brain tissue. Oh, and for the record, he had pointed out at the start of the Olympic hockey tournament that Pavel wasn’t one-hundred percent ready to compete, and all he had received as a response was a stubborn statement that “Mike Babcock isn’t my concern right now.” Maybe the memory of that mildly miffed dismissal from Pavel pissed him off all the more and made him determined to show Pavel that a ticked off Mike Babcock was a very real concern at any time. 

He was well within his rights to give Pavel a good bawling out, because making the playoffs with a wet-behind-the-ears squad was enough of a long-shot without star players taking it upon themselves to reduce the odds further by injuring themselves at the Olympics when they should have been recuperating for two weeks, instead, he concluded, as he shoved his chair away from his desk and lurched out of his office into the hallway. Just thank the Lord for small mercies that the migraine of realignment had placed them in the weaker Eastern Conference, or else they would probably have been eliminated from contention for even a Wild Card slot out West. 

Storming down the corridor to the medical room, where he was most likely to find Pavel, Mike thought that with some star players, the challenge was in kicking their butts enough to get them pouring a pound of sweat into each shift. With the Euro Twins, it had always been the opposite, because his job with Datsyuk and Zetterberg was to try to occasionally scare them into slowing down to save their bodies. He still recalled how he had roasted them alive a few years ago for jumping hurdles in the locker room before a regular season game against the St. Louis Blues, since, in their words, they had needed to get ready for the playoffs…

He had been sitting in his office, humming tunelessly to himself as he fiddled with line combinations and tweaked special teams units, feeling like a mad scientist experimenting with various chemical components in the hope of sparking a reaction, when he kept forgetting players’ surnames or positions owing to an infernal racket—squeaking wood screeching across tiles, shouting, laughter, and what sounded like an entire infantry’s worth of feet pounding—slicing through the wall from the locker room next door. 

Regarding it as his duty to figure out what antics his players were up to now, especially since they were preventing him from focusing on tactics for the upcoming game, he had marched into the locker room, expecting to see some pranksters overturning furniture, but actually discovering Pavel and Henrik laughing and leaping over hurdles with movements that were perfectly synchronized, apparently indifferent to the fact that they were wearing themselves out before warmups even started. 

Slamming the door in his wake alerted them to his presence. Both blinked and hesitated. Then, communicating through radio waves Mike could never intercept, they commenced jumping over the hurdles again at the same nanosecond. In a nutshell, that was the charm and danger of the Euro Twins: you could never pinpoint who the ringleader of their circuses was, because they had an instinctual intimacy that allowed them to detect and interpret signals from each other that everyone else was oblivious to, so you had to watch the pair of them and sense, with a sinking in your stomach, that when they did act, it would already be too late for you to stop them in their latest magic and madness. 

“What is going on here?” Mike snapped, folding his arms across his chest. 

“Our new training regime,” answered Henrik, shrugging mid-leap. He would cease jumping if Mike ordered him to, since, in Detroit, stars were never deliberately defiant, just quietly resolved to be unstoppable forces and immovable objects, but until he had received an explicit command to abandon leaping over the hurdles, he, along with Pavel, was plainly going to persist in doing so. 

“What the hell are you doing?” barked Mike, jabbing a finger at the hurdles the Euro Twins had erected in an obstacle course through the locker room. 

“Jumping hurdles,” Pavel replied, landing and leaping into the air again, as he displayed the sort of literalness he did when he was feeling obstinate. It was no coincidence, as far as Mike was concerned, that Pavel, who was as sharp as a honed skate blade, fortified the language barrier when being obtuse was advantageous to him. 

“You’re going to stop jumping them now, damn it!” snarled Mike, feeling his eyes bulge out of their sockets. 

With muscles burned to obey that certain menacing tone, Pavel and Henrik halted immediately as their coach went on tersely, “We have a game to play against St. Louis tonight, and I won’t have you two idiots exhausting yourselves before the puck is even dropped.” 

“We aren’t exhausting ourselves.” Henrik’s chin rose in protest. “We’re building our endurance.” 

“Better heart rate,” chimed in Pavel, whose head had been bobbing a light confirmation of every word that exited Henrik’s mouth. “Better lung capacity. Getting ready for playoffs.” 

“This is not how you get prepared for the playoffs or a regular season game.” Mike glared into first Pavel’s and then Henrik’s eyes to emphasize that he was serious as the cardiac risk of eating every meal at McDonald’s. “You’re battering your bodies needlessly, and I won’t tolerate that, because, when the playoffs come, they’ll be battered enough. Now, you can push those hurdles up against the wall, so nobody breaks a God damn leg tripping over them. That should be enough of a workout for you two fitness fanatics, and if I catch either of you doing anything else involving the hurdles tonight, there’ll be hell to pay. Understand?” 

“Got it, Coach,” Henrik muttered, as he and Pavel heaved up a hurdle and began lugging it toward the far wall…

As Mike barged into the medical room, he tore free of the clinging tendrils of this spiderweb of memory. Glaring around the room, he saw Pavel, stretched out on a gunnery with an icepack wrapped in a towel over his inflamed knee, alone and made a beeline over to him. 

“Out for another two weeks at least,” Mike declared abruptly, and, when Pavel nodded, he went on sardonically, “I’m sure you were one-hundred percent healthy to compete in Sochi, though.” 

“One hundred percent for athlete and normal person different.” Pavel shrugged “Doctors cleared me, and you played me for two games before I left.” 

“For fifteen minutes.” Mike’s face was a thunderhead on the cusp of a torrential downpour, because he couldn’t help but wondering if those two games had just been Get Out of Jail Free cards that Pavel could draw on if anyone accused him of being disloyal to his NHL franchise where the Olympics was concerned, and Mike wasn’t accustomed to questioning the commitment of any of his star players. “I didn’t double shift you like Russia did.” 

“Worry about Hank’s back.” Pavel’s lips thinned, and Mike sensed another vintage Euro Twin ploy to shift attention to their counterpart. It wasn’t about sibling rivalry, as Mike had initially assumed, but about subtle misdirection of the audience: don’t worry about my shot, but watch out for his deke; ignore my positioning, but beware of his dangling; focus on his back but don’t spare a thought for my knee. “He’s the one who’ll be out for the rest of the season.” 

“I have the brainpower to worry about both of you.” Mike tapped Pavel’s shoulder to make it clear that he would not be so easily fooled by a classic Euro Twin trick. “You were skating on one leg before you left for Sochi, and now you can’t skate at all. That’s a big issue to me.” 

“Stevie went to Salt Lake City when he was skating on one leg.” Pavel removed the icepack from his knee to give his skin a break from the unrelenting cold. 

“If I were his coach then, I would have been pissed off at him, too,” snapped Mike, contemplating whether the Red Wings subjected all their their stars to a top-secret surgery to extract all pain nerves. 

“Our team won the Cup that year.” Gingerly, Pavel massaged his inflamed knee. “Not impossible to win Cup and go to the Olympics in same year.” 

“This year we’ll have to work our butts of to even make the playoffs,” growled Mike. “I don’t see a dozen future Hall of Famers on this team, do you?” 

“Ken Holland said it was my decision to go to Sochi or to stay here and rest.” Pavel’s expression was implacable as a mule’s. “Not your decision, but mine, and I live with the consequences.” 

“No, Pavel.” Cutting as a knife, Mike shook his head. “You made your choice, and we all live with the consequences. I just didn’t believe you were selfish enough to risk needing surgery when we were in the middle of a playoff push.” 

Recoiling as if he had been slapped across the face, Pavel mumbled, “You don’t understand.” 

He sounded genuinely wounded, as if Detroit was the only haven in America where he could be confident of being known and appreciated for who he was. 

“I understand well enough.” Brusque in his dismissal, Mike spun on his heel and strode to the door only to be halted by Pavel’s voice. 

His accent, as it almost always did when he was distraught, thickening to the extent that his words were borderline indecipherable, Pavel protested, “You don’t listen. Never do. Always talking. Not fair.” 

Pinching the crest of his nose, Mike observed inwardly that he believed he had improved at listening to his players since he had arrived in Detroit, but perhaps Pavel didn’t perceive things in that light at all. He would have to tread carefully here, because, after all, he had nearly missed discovering that Steve Yzerman was even more incredible than everyone claimed by refusing to really listen to Stevie until it was almost too late. 

When he had first come to Detroit, he had regarded Stevie’s trademark stubbornness as being the defining attribute of a spoiled star, since by all accounts, even Scotty Bowman had left a majority of the minutia of managing a locker room to Steve Yzerman. Mike had convinced himself that Stevie’s ego kept him clinging to a hockey career long after his Best Before date had passed, so he hadn’t seen until injuries opened his eyes that Stevie was just sticking around until Pavel and Henrik were completely ready to fill the void his retirement would leave at the forward position. Maybe if Mike had listened better, he would not have confused selflessness and sacrifice with selfishness and pride, although sometimes it seemed that only the finest of lines separated those two very different territories. 

“All right.” Taking a deep breath and exhaling it in measured bursts, Mike whirled around and returned to Pavel. “I’m listening now. What do you want to tell me?” 

“Russia is my home, and I dream of playing in Olympics there since forever.” Pavel’s hands flew around like birds with clipped wings as they so often did when he could not express a complex idea or emotion in English. “I need to play there in same way you need to coach in Vancouver.” 

“Pasha.” Using the nickname Pavel had possessed since childhood, Mike rubbed at the taut knots tied in the back of Pavel’s neck. Deciding that his concern about Pavel’s inflamed knee was valid, but Pavel’s desire to compete in Sochi wasn’t exactly wrong either, he compromised by continuing gruffly, “I’m not going to apologize for getting ticked off at you for your headstrong disregard for your own health, and I’m not sorry for being worried about your knee since I give a shit about you, but I understand your choice to go to the Olympics, and I’m not going to condemn you for it.” 

“I’m not sorry for arguing with you.” Pavel’s eyes gleamed, and Mike took that as a warning that he might be the target of a dazzling Datsyuk one-liner. “But you best coach, and I’m appreciating that.” 

“Flattery won’t stop me from kicking your butt in practice when you return.” Arching an eyebrow, Mike swatted Pavel’s elbow. 

“Wouldn’t want it to.” All slyness, Pavel smiled. “Then you wouldn’t be best coach anymore.”


End file.
